William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme

Old Whaling
Staton at Bunabhainneadar & the North Harris Mountains

William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, lived from 19 September
1851 to 7 May 1925. More usually referred to as Lord Leverhulme, he was an
English industrialist, philanthropist and colonialist who, amongst many other
ventures, for a time owned the whole of Lewis and
Harris and had a profound and
lasting influence on the island.

William Lever was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1851, and educated
at the Bolton Church Institute. His working life started in his father's
wholesale grocery business. In 1886, Lever established a soap manufacturing
company called Lever Brothers (now part of Unilever) with his brother James. It
was one of the first companies to manufacture soap from vegetable oils, and
proved enormously successful.

From 1888, Lever began to put his philanthropic principles into
practice through the construction of Port Sunlight on Merseyside, a model
community designed to house and support the workers of Lever Brothers, who
already enjoyed generous wages and innovative benefits. Lever's philanthropy
tended to be on his own terms. Life in Port Sunlight included intrusive rules
and involved compulsory participation in activities. And with accommodation
tied to employment, a worker losing his or her job could be almost
simultaneously evicted. Despite all this, conditions, pay, hours, and benefits
were all more favourable than normal for industry of the day.

In the early 1900s, Lever was using as a raw material palm oil
produced in the British West African colonies. The need to expand capacity led
him to visit the Belgian Congo in 1911, where he entered into a concession to
obtain palm oil: an episode that casts a shadow over his reputation as many of
the plantations from which Lever sourced his oil used a system of forced labour
little better than slavery.

In 1918, Lord Leverhulme purchased the
Isle of Lewis for £150,000
from the Matheson family:
the northern two-thirds of the land mass that also includes
Harris. He arrived to set up home
in Lews Castle, Stornoway, with
the declared intention of revolutionising the island and the lives of its
30,000 residents. Elements of his dream amounted to little less than an image
of Port Sunlight reborn in an island environment, whose economy would be driven
by the exploitation of the vast fish reserves in the surrounding seas. New
fishing fleets would catch fish spotted by land-based aircraft; new ports would
be built linked by railways and new roads to
Stornoway, which would be
transformed into a huge fish-processing centre. The output would be marketed
through a 400 strong chain of retail fish shops, MacFisheries, set up across
the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile a chemical industry
would be developed processing the seaweed so plentiful around the island; peat
would be used in large scale power stations; and unproductive land transformed
into forests or fruit and dairy farms. Lewis would grow to become an island of
up to 200,000 people. He set to work with considerable energy, and over the
following years would invest the better part of a million pounds on Lewis.

There were two main problems with Lord Leverhulme's grand scheme.
The first was that the state of the fish market in the UK was probably never
sufficiently strong to drive that critically important element of it forward.
The second was that many of the islanders of
Lewis had a very different view of
their future. For many decades there has been growing dissatisfaction over the
fact that insufficient land was available for crofting. In the aftermath of the
First World War, in which a disproportionate 1000 of those who enlisted from
the island had been killed, and 205 more drowned when the troopship Iolaire
sank in the entrance to Stornoway harbour on 1 January 1919
(the reason why many Hebridean war memorials refer to the war of 1914-1919),
the pressure for land reform grew to bursting point.

Leverhulme was not a man to whom compromise came naturally, and
neither was he known for his patience. Still worse, he saw the expansion of a
crofting economy as running directly in conflict with his own dreams. Matters
came to a head when he did not receive the popular support he expected at
public meetings, and "land raiders" settled on areas of his farmland near
Stornoway in an effort to force the creation of more crofts. The Scottish
Office, which tried to steer a middle course declined to give Leverhulme all
the support he thought he was due. His response was unexpected: he brought the
whole of Harris in two lots in May
and June of 1919, paying £20,000 for South Harris and £36,000 for
North Harris.

In the face of more occupations of his land in Lewis, Leverhulme
announced in February 1920 that he was ceasing development work in Lewis, and
would in future focus wholly on Harris. The centre of his attention was the
small fishing port of Obbe, which (following some heavy hints from their new
owner) the residents decided should be called
Leverburgh. Two years later he
revived the whaling station at
Bunabhainneadar.

Meanwhile, Lord Leverhulme's attention and resources were focused
elsewhere. A poor business deal in Nigeria in 1920 almost took him and his
company into liquidation and for a while his ability to invest in Harris dried
up. By 1922 the situation in Lewis had become intractable, and many of those
who wanted crofting land chose to emigrate instead. In September 1923,
Leverhulme admitted defeat and made the truly remarkable offer to give Lewis in
its entirety to its residents. His proposal was to divide it into two areas:
the land within 7 miles of Stornoway and the rest, and give each part to a
separate trust to be set up for the benefit of the residents. It rapidly became
clear that the Stornoway element could be self sustaining; but that the second
proposed trust looking after the remainder of Lewis could not. The Scottish
Secretary, Viscount Novar, in an act of monumental short-sightedness, refused
to cover the funding gap of £1,365 per year needed to allow the second
trust to operate. The land offered as a gift to it - most of
Lewis - was instead put on the
market, though it proved very difficult to sell at any price.

Lord Leverhume died of pneumonia after a trip to Africa in May
1925. His son immediately pulled the plug on all investment in
Harris. £250,000 had been
spent on new works and facilities in
Leverburgh, but Leverhume's
dream died with him, and the plant at Leverburgh was sold for just £5,000
to a demolition company. The vast South Harris estate, purchased in 1919 for
£36,000, was sold for just £900. Other parts of Lewis and Harris
were sold piecemeal with the exception of the area under the control of the
Stornoway Trust.